I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

The Solution Remains the Same

As many other pundits and analysts have pointed out, in the mid-to-late 1970s we endured a massive “climate change scare” that was the exact opposite of the one we’re enduring now. Back then, the media and activists trumpeted the arrival of a new ice age, with the specter of ice sheets and glaciers covering half the northern hemisphere, and brutal winters in the remaining ice-free zones.

The fact that the media and popular culture and academia have veered from one panic-inducing disaster scenario to another one which completely contradicts the first one is funny enough in its own right. But reading The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age opened my eyes to an even more significant aspect of this serial crisis-mongering:

The “solutions” prescribed to solve both Global Warming and the looming Ice Age are exactly the same.

In both cases, proponents of the theory-du-jour say that in order to stave off disaster, we must reverse the march of civilization, stop our profligate use of carbon-based fuels, cede power and money from the First World to the Third World, and wherever possible revert to a Luddite pre-industrial lifestyle.